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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

For those interested, here's a nice article on history, decline, usage, and fan clubs surrounding OS/2:

http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the...

I tried it once a few years ago to see what fuss was about. It reminded me of a slightly-better Windows 3.1. Maybe one of those zealots in the article could show me in a live demo why it was great then or if it is now in any way. Not sure. The claimed reliability of it would be a lasting benefit if that was common vs what was achieved with a primitive, predictable application. High-security methods at code or compiler level might also be applied to it if it's relatively small.

Could be some potential but I think it's probably one of history's dead ends.

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I used OS/2 for years, including as a development machine (win 3.1 buildds) while at Netscape.

I just liked it's stability and network stack as compared to Windows at the time. For me, it was a more stable DOS type environment with a decent GUI in Workplace Shell.

I kept a machine running it for years (still have a vm somewhere) since I really enjoyed the original Galaxtic Civilizations from Stardock.

As a developer using OS/2 in its heydey and the early part of its decline I would say your assessment was spot on. Before NT the pre-emptive multi-tasking and ability to run Windows executables as well as OS/2 ones was a significant merit. Once NT came along it so clearly didn't have a future.

By the by "IBM VisualAge for C++ for OS/2" has to be a contender for world's least snappy product name.

Couldn't agree more re: product names. What people would call Sushi, IBM would specifically call "dead raw cold fish on white rice".

I still twitch a bit over the WebSphere branding apocalypse when they decided their (IMO ghastly) Java app server's name should be applied to All The Things.

As a former IBMer in '90s, I would like to nominate VisualAge for Java as another example of awkward naming choices. The team I was on used VAJ (as it was always referred to in electronic communications) extensively. In speech, people would often pronounce the acronym rather than say "VisualAge" or "VisualAge for Java". Of course, they pronounced it "vadge", because how else would you pronounce VAJ? Sometimes it was said by someone being mischievous, but much more often it was said by people who had no idea that it was slang for something much more exciting.

Brilliant. Thanks for this! I loved OS/2 when I used it briefly, but my computer wasn't powerful enough to run the OS let alone making any dev environment run. IBM should have shipped their Dev environment with OS/2, and then it might have caught on as it then would have had a very low barrier to entry.

That sounds terrible. One positive, potentially, that I found was an object-based GUI or system model that supposedly let the developers handle that stuff better than Windows or UNIX/X-Windows. OS/2 fanboys always say something about it. Any insight or opinions on that?

Nope, I'm afraid I was using the Visual Age class library (which was pretty good) for most if not all of the development work I had a hand in.

I used it as a development workstation back in the early 1990s in an all-IBM shop. I remember it taking an eternity to boot up (like 10 minutes?) on the PS/2 desktop machines we had. Once it was up and running it was OK as I recall.

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